Name

man - Prints pages in the manual

Syntax

man [ options ] [ section ] title

Description

Man locates and prints pages for the named title from the designated section in the ProLine Reference Manual.

Since commands are given in lowercase, the title is always entered in lowercase. Section names are always uppercase. If no section is specified, the entire manual is searched for a matching title, and the first occurrence found is printed. You can search through a group of sections by separating the section names with colons (:) on the command line.

Man can display all entries for a specified section by using an asterisk (*) as the title. A section argument must be given.

Options


The following options are recognized by man:

-a

“All” mode. Displays matching titles found in all sections of search list.

-d

Formats output for a dot-matrix printer.

-l rows

Sets the length of your output device in rows.

-p

“Progress” mode. Prints the pathname of each title being processed.

-t title

Assigns a title to the header (e.g. -t "Local Commands"). This is mostly useful when printing an entire section.

-w cols

Sets the width of your output device in columns.

Section Names


The names and general descriptions of the available manual sections are:

ADM

Administrator’s Utilities

C

Commands

CT

Text Processing Commands

CP

Programming Commands

F

File Formats

G

Games

HW

Hardware Dependent

LOCAL

Local Utilities

M

Miscellaneous

NET

Network Commands

S

Subroutines and Libraries

You can add other section names as you desire. Each new section, however, must follow the standard section directory structure.

$/sys/man Directory Structure


The source files for the man program are kept in section directories in $/sys/man. Each section is given its own directory, starting with the name “man.” and followed by the section name (e.g. man.LOCAL). The source files are similarly tagged with their section name (e.g. cat.C for cat, which resides in $/sys/man/man.C).

There is also an index file called index in $/sys/man. This index is a list of aliases for titles that do not have their own source files. For example, “rmdir” does not have its own source file, but is aliased to “rm” which includes documentation for “rmdir”.

$/etc/rsrc/man.rsrc


The resource file for man, if it exists, contains a single line of all section names, separated by colons (:). The sections should be listed in the order in which titles should be searched. The default search order is:

ADM:C:S:NET:CP:CT:M:F:HW:LOCAL:G

Creating New Manual Entries


You can create new manual pages for utilities and scripts that you have developed. Formatting is accomplished by inserting dot macros into the manual entry file. For more information, refer to the manuals(F) entry.

Printer Output


To redirect output to the printer, use:

man -d -w 96 C * >.printer

This example enables dot-matrix formatting for a printer capable of displaying 96 columns of text. All titles in the “C” (Commands) section would be printed.

To print manuals to a PostScript device, such as a laser printer, see manps(CT).

File Redirection


To redirect manual output to a file, use >filename as the last argument.

Files

$/sys/man/*
directory of manual sections and entries,
$/sys/man/index
index to aliased titles.

See Also

help(C), manps(CT), manuals(F), whatis(CT)